Monday, October 17, 2005

I am doing well- very busy - saw 44 patients today. The last few weeks have been crazy with some very sick patients. Unfortunately a few of them have not made it and died at the referral center- mainly due to malaria and anemia! Also a few malnutrition cases - a 1 1/2 year old girl, weighing 5 kg and severely dehydrated didn't make it after 4 days of hospitilization. Again, many of these conditions can be treated if the child reaches a health center sooner. For some reason in the past week I have also seen more children with deformities (large tumors on their faces, scalp, cleft lips etc). People still seem to think that we can do everything that the ship could do. Well, I have to tell them that we can't. However, with the ship going to Liberia we have been able to schedule a few cases. One mom came with a 5 month old baby- born with no right eye and a cleft lip. She said her family thinks the child is bewitched and she is too ashamed to take him home. She almost begged me to write a note saying I was going to try to find help for the child. I look forward to meeting her again on Wednesday- so that I can tell her we have scheduled her child for surgery on the Anastasis mid November!Another positive note- I diagnosed my first appendicitis here; a 5 year old boy with abdominal pain. The physical exam and lab work sure made me highly suspicious, so I referred to Emergency Center. A few days later the mom and child came back to the clinic. They said the ride out to emergency was pretty bad because the potholes sure made the boys belly hurt, however, they were seen right away at Emergency and the surgery was done within hours. A few days after that the surgeon confirmed that yes it was appendicitis. As you can see there are good outcomes and bad outcomes. Plenty of things to deal with, be sad about and ponder upon, but also plenty of things to be thankful for!